Get Social

Adventures in Blogging: June 2017 Blog Report

(Since this blog post, the blog has been re-branded! Letters From Sunshine is now Forever Charlotte Nicole, but it is still the same great content!)

In case you’ve never tuned into my monthly blog reports before (if you haven’t, then here are the January & February, March & April, and May Blog Reports), then I’m glad to have you here. My name is Charlotte and I am the blogger behind Letters From Sunshine, and June marked my 5th month of blogging. Woo-hoo!

A lot of exciting stuff happened in June for my blog, which I’m interested to see if it carries over to the future months. Without giving anything else away before even beginning my blog report, let me present to you the June 2017 blog report!

Adventure One: Blog Posts

Once I handed in my last final in May, I couldn’t wait to spend my summer blogging. I had been bitten with the writing bug and was at a loss of which blog post I should begin writing first, and my dozens of ideas were scattered between notebooks, sheets of paper, and my phone’s memo pad. The month of May went well with four blog posts, but June? Hmmm….not so much.

Between going camping for a week (an exciting travel post about that coming soon!) and working close to 40 hours each week this past month, I’ve hardly had time to write as much as I’ve wanted. However, I have managed to get a few blog posts up:

I’m not going to lie, this was one of the most fun blog posts for me to write, but it was also extremely time-consuming. Coming in at a little over 3160 words, it took me over 40 revisions/saves spread out over the course of several weeks to get it just how I wanted it; I couldn’t be happier with it. While this amount of work may sound a bit crazy to some people, it was the first ever travel post that I’ve done, so I had to spend a lot of time finding my voice for this type of post and how I wanted to present my travel experience.

This post was also included on The Swirl’s Ultimate Travel Guide, which is an amazing round-up of many bloggers’ travel posts. If you are travelling anytime soon (or if you want to go read another amazing college blog), be sure to head on over to this post and see if it includes a travel guide for your destination!

Although this post was published just a little over two weeks ago, it has already become super popular, ranking at #3 for the month of June. With many incoming freshmen starting on their packing lists, I knew that this was definitely something that I needed to write and share. This post isn’t about the most forgotten items, like you may originally think, but rather what students never even think to bring in the first place.

Adventure Two: Social Media

At the end of June, I had 105 followers on Twitter, a gain of 29 followers from May. Although this may sound super small to some people, this is really exciting for me because I’m not extremely active on Twitter. (i.e. I never know what to tweet.)

I participated in TWO twitter chats in June! These twitter chats are always super fun because I get to connect with other bloggers in my niche.

Instagram was a lot harder for me to grow this month. I wasn’t as active on the platform as I was in May (due to working during my times of peak engagement), so I ended June with 139 followers, a gain of 17 from May. This fell very short of my gain of 45 followers from April to May, so this month (July) I have already started working on posting more often and adding to my Instagram stories more often.

At the end of June, I had 19 Facebook likes and 20 follows, an increase of 7 in both categories. Although this may sound small to some, it’s 3x more than the amount I gained in May, so this was super exciting to me.

Although I’ve been on Bloglovin’ for several months, it hasn’t been a platform that I’ve mentioned in earlier blog reports because there was little/no gain in followers. However, since there was a sudden increase in the month of June (which I attribute to my new blog design’s button for Bloglovin’), I decided to start reporting it. At the end of June, I had 11 Bloglovin’ followers. Although this is small, there is so much room for growth that I can’t wait to see in the future.

Although Pinterest has had its own category in previous blog reports, I decided that it was time to put it back into the social media group, since I haven’t made as many changes on it as I have in the past.

This month I have continued to use auto-schedulers to schedule my pins, which has led to a great increase in following and a HUGE increase in pageviews. (More on that in Adventure Three!)

My Pinterest followers in June ended at 150, a gain of 31 followers from May!

Adventure Three: Site Stats

I’m going to be completely honest: I was extremely frustrated with my site’s stats at the beginning of the month. My site had done so well in May with 3922 pageviews, and I had my highest number of pageviews ever for a single day (almost 300!). But in the beginning of June, it was beginning to seem as if that luck had gone away. My pageviews were sinking into the 70s and 80s per day after being in the 100s for so long; I was beginning to worry that Letters From Sunshine wasn’t going to be growing much in the month of June. After all, Letters From Sunshine is a college blog, and since college wasn’t in session, it would make sense that the number of pageviews would drop.

After getting back from a week of camping (where I was basically inactive on the blog all week), I opened my Google Analytics app, not expecting to see much of a difference. If anything, I was expecting it to be a repeat of the previous day’s pageviews (which was in the 70s).

When I saw that it was in the 400s, I figured I must have set it at the week at a glance. After all, how in the world could it go from being in the 70s to being in the 400s? When I double checked, however, it wasn’t on the week at a glance; it was for the single day, and with several hours left in the day, it was still climbing. I was ecstatic.

I ended that day with 643 pageviews, whereas the previous day had 78. This is absolutely amazing, and since I autoschedule my pins on Pinterest, I have no doubt as to why it skyrocketed so quickly. Since then, I’ve consistently had hundreds of pageviews a day.

June 2017 pageviews for Letters From Sunshine

So with this sudden climb in pageviews, are you wondering what the total for June was? Well…how does 7567 sound?

*insert me screaming in excitement here*

Let me just remind you that June was only my fifth month of blogging. In May, I had 3922 pageviews, and in April I had 2600 pageviews. My pageviews almost doubled last month, and I can’t be more excited. I’m hoping this trend continues into July as well, but if it doesn’t I won’t be too upset. Just to have grown this much so quickly is more than I ever dreamed of, and I can’t wait to see where else my blogging journey will take me.

Adventure Four: Blog Changes

While no major changes happened in the month of June, a small change did happen: I changed my blog’s signature

Originally, when I planned Letters From Sunshine (called so because I have a very happy, “sunshine” personality), I decided to sign my blog posts as if my name was actually “Sunshine” because the blog is called “Letters From Sunshine.” However, I began June with what I like to call a “mid-blog crisis”, where I was considering re-branding my entire blog and changing the name. Although I eventually decided not to do it, I did decide to begin signing my posts with “Charlotte” rather than “Sunshine.” In the coming months, I’ll be working my way back through my old blog posts and fixing the signature on them, but not all at once because I also plan to update them along the way. This means that if you ever notice that this signature change (or has not) been done on an older post, then this is why.

I also have some news about future blog reports. In the future, I will be pairing them up into two months at a time. Although this is not what I originally wanted, I was happier doing them this way in my previous blog reports, as it gives me more time to focus on the college and college-bound content for the blog.

However, I’m not saying that I’m going to be doing this all the time. If there’s ever a month that has a lot of news or if there is something really great that I want to share with you all, I might just have a blog report for a single month. Unless that happens, then they will be paired up in the future.

So, what did you think? Forever Charlotte Nicole has grown so much throughout the past few months, and I can’t wait to see what happens in the coming months!

Related

Welcome Friends!

I'm Charlotte, the blogger behind This Girl Knows It. You can usually find me planning my next trip, editing photos, or obsessing way too much about tulle skirts. Take a look around the blog to discover more of my story, and be sure to follow along on social media!

Follow me on Twitter

Networks

The Categories

Let’s Get Social

Stay Wanderlust

Don't you just love cookies? Both the kind you eat and the kind on websites. This site uses the later to improve your site experience. We'll assume you're okay with this, but you can opt-out if you wish.AcceptRejectRead More